Qtpfsgui

It's been a while, but now a new version of qtpfsgui is in works. Just want to let you know. I have recreated the whole toolchain on my laptop, with new versions of exiv2, fftw, libtiff, ilmbase, andopenexr - and as usual everything is not smooth, but the progress is fine.

Stay tuned!

Modified Qtpfsgui 1.9.1 is up

I think I have corrected the issues with the first OSX version of qtpfsgui 1.9.1. There is a new disk image at sourceforge now, please go grab it and create some nice images :)

Take care

Qtpfsgui 1.9.1 is out!

Hi folks,

I managed to build the 1.9.1 a bit quicker than the 1.9.0 :) Hopefully, the problems with align_image_stack is resolved with this version, I haven't had the time yet to test it myself. User-experiences are welcome!

Take care.

Qtpfsgui 1.9.0 update

Just a short notice - there was a minor problem with the first 1.9.0 dmg I uploaded to sourceforge. A library that is not included on either Tiger or Leopard (as far as i know) by Apple, was dynamically linked into the app. I have now uploaded a new dmg where the libintl library (which was the problem) is statically linked into the qtpfsgui app.

Hope this fix some problems! Userreports are welcome, as always.

Take care.

Qtpfsgui 1.9.0 for Mac

I have managed to sort out most of the issues with Qtpfsgui 1.9.0 on Mac, and have uploaded a diskimage to sourceforge.

Please note:

• This version of qtpfsgui is not universal, you have to use an intel-based Mac.
  
• You should get the latest Qt from trolltech, at least if you run into problems
• I had some issues when testing autoalign features in the binary. I'm thankful for user-reports!

So, go ahead over to sourceforge, and grab the new qtpfsgui, and tell me what it can do for you!

Take care.

MacVim binary for Leopard

Some time ago, I build a binary of MacVim for Leopard, as I couldn't find one online. I suggested that I could make it available online if someone is in the need, but didn't got any requests until now.

As I now got a request, my build of MacVim is available! The version of vim in this build is 7.1.156. So far, that's good enough for me. If I upgrade later on, I'll provide a new diskimage! The binary was build on a MacBook Pro running Leopard. I have not made any attempt making a universal binary, so dependent on how the default build of MacVim is set up, it may or may not work on a powerpc.

If you find it useful, feel free to drop me a comment!

Take care,

Qtpfsgui news!

Hi folks! I have some good news for those of you who awaits the 1.9.0 release of Qtpfsgui for Mac OSX. For a long time I have had problems compiling the dependencies as I have moved to Leopard. Today, I finally got everything running, and will put a diskimage of the app on sourceforge quite soon. I just have to clean up a few things (dcraw and auto align stuff).

There is one caveat, though. I had to let my aim of doing a universal build go. For some reason, I am not able to compile the exiv2 library as a universal binary, which make it impossible for me to create a universal qtpfsgui. So if there still are PPC folks out there, you have to look elsewhere for a qtpfsgui. As I have very little time for this project right now, it might take a while before I look into the universal exiv2 again.

Take care!

MacVim on Leopard

I had some issues with the Gvim from Macvim.org, related to the python-version linked in that version of Vim. There is also a version of vim delivered with MacOSX Leopard, but that version does not have the python bindings.

A couple of weeks ago I discovered the MacVim at http://code.google.com/p/macvim/, and when I discovered the python-issues today I figured I could try that vim. Unfortunately, the binary that is available there is built against python2.3 (Tiger), and I like to use the python2.5 on Leopard. Luckily, there are some nice instructions in the wikipages! Without much trouble, I was able to build my very own Leopard MacVim with python2.5.

If someone need a binary, just tell me - I can share!

Btw, if you wonder why I wanted a vim with python2.5, check this page: http://djcraven5.blogspot.com/2006/10/send-gmail-message-from-vim.html. Now I have libgmail in my python2.5 environment, a python2.5 enabled MacVim, and I can send email right from my editor. Neat!

Hugin auto-align in Qtpfsgui

I am still working on the interface to the align_image_stack program in Qtpfsgui. The maintainer of the OSX-port of Hugin, Ippei Ukay, has been so kind to provide us with a statically linked version of the program that at least work quite well on my computers. I have some issues with making Qtpfsgui picking up the location of the binary automatically, but for now you can download the binary here, and place it in a directory usually in your PATH environment. The directory /usr/local/bin may be a good place to store it, but if that does not work put it in /usr/bin. Qtpfsgui v.1.8.12 should then be able to find and use the align_image_stack program.

[edit:] Remark, after you download the align_image_stack binary, you need to set the executable bit on the file. Open a Terminal and do 'sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/align_image_stack' (assuming you placed the file in /usr/bin).

In the future, the Hugin image aligner will be included with Qtpfsgui, so no extra work should be required to use it - I hope!

[edit2:] You may as well download the align_image_stack binary inside a zip-file - by popular request!
Take care

Qtpfsgui news!

Hi, Giuseppe figured out the problem with qtpfsgui 1.8.12 on OSX today, and created a sucessful fix. The 1.8.12 version now compiles and runs just fine on the Mac again.

I have uploaded the new version over at sourceforge, please grab it there. In the process of eliminating sources for errors, I have also upgraded my tool chain a bit. There are therefor now newer versions of most of the dependencies, but since most of these are linked directly into the binary you should not need to do anything. I have however updated my version of Qt. I believe that Qt is sufficiently backwards compatible such that this should not cause a problem, but if you get any problem running the new binary, please update Qt by downloading the newest version from this link. You may also visit http://trolltech.com/developer/downloads/qt/mac where the download-link for the diskimage can be found, as well as sources.

Now that 1.8.12 is out the door, I will look into the alignment functionality that Giuseppe have included, to see what kind of problems that pose on the Mac.

Take care.

Nokia E61i as a modem for Macbook Pro

I had some questions regarding Nokia E61i as modem for my Macbook Pro in the past. I have posted how I got that working as a comment on one of the E61i posts (the one about Nokia and Papyrus, I'll dig up the link).

Please, read my comment, and post further questions here!

Btw, I am posting this from my Macbook Pro connected to the 'net over bluetooth and the E61i. So it works!

update: This is the interesting post!

Take care,

Well done, Apple!

That was it for this year - the WWDC'07 is history. My first post, based on the impressions from the keynote, was a bit harsh in the tone, so I figured I should say a few more words.

First, I must say congratulations to the folks who put together WWDC'07. Just face it folks, they must have had a big problem. All the announcements were done in 2006, probably under the assumption that everything would have been on the streets this year. Which did not happened. Still, they managed to put together an impressive program. While the keynote was a bit bad, and as a side note - I am not the only one who have that opinion; most of the people I spoke to at the event shared my view - the rest of the event was very good. Unfortunately, all the other sessions are under NDA so folks that did not attend will not know much about that. But because our shared opinion was that the keynote was not outstanding, the people at Apple who was responsible for the program and the content and the presentations deserved a big thank you. Many of the presentations was excellent both in content and delivery. And especially in the developer tools sessions we saw and heard a lot of new things. Which we can not talk about of course. But, developers out there, expect cool stuff :)

Hopefully that set the record straight. I still have to just dream about my favorite 10 inch touch-screen macbook pro though, as now new hardware was revealed. We'll see what they can come up with next year.

Now I am off to the more academic Usenix Annual Tech, and can speak freely again! That does not mean that I have something to say, of course. By the way, I can also still play with my Leopard seed dvd which I must say is quite functional :)

Until later, take care!

Qtpfsgui - new version

Hi guys, Giuseppe have put together a new version of qtpfsgui, and as always, I try to keep up with the version for OSX. As I happen to be at the Apple developer conference, WWDC'07, right now, it's a great time for poking around with this stuff.

So, alas, the 1.8.9 version of qtpfsgui for OSX is out on sourceforge now. Besides that, there is not very much to say, I have not done any special mac-tweaks this time. Check the regular files for general changes.

Again, I do not provide a version with Qt built in, as I have not seen any request for that. Head over to trolltech and get Qt there if you don't have it. I understand that version 4.3 of Qt is out now, but I still put this together with the previous version. I plan to grab the new Qt and check that everything works as it should, but if someone gets ahead of me, please comment on success or failure.

The WWDC'07 keynote

This years WWDC'07 keynote is history. As always it was delivered by Steve Jobs. I have to say it was a mediocre event. The presentation was smooth enough, but Steve seems to be a bit uninspired. And with good reasons, as much of what was delivered was just a repetition of what we heard last year. No new hardware was presented, the shipping date for the "Leopard" is still october and the iPhone is not out yet.

The only new things really was that there will be a new desktop and a new finder (the file browser and management thing in OSX). Not a very big deal, mostly graphics tweaks that people like myself tend to avoid anyway. There was quite a few animated demos on stage, but notting to brag about to be honest. Sure, Leopard will be great and everything, don't get me wrong. But we know most of it already!

There was also announced that EA and id will have more games on OSX in the future, which I guess is great for people who avoid apple due to limited gaming support. And then Apple will start pushing browser to windows users, but I don't care much about that either as I use firefox anyway. It might be good for IE users, though. And it is supposed to be fast, too.

There has been some discussions on iPhone and development tools. This was but was not presented, too. What apple had to say on this is that iPhone will have a full safari engine inside, so people can do web2.0/ajax style applications that can be used on the iPhone. Which is a no-solution solution. It was not mentioned whether such applications can be downloaded and installed or have to be run from a webserver all the time. It was mentioned that such applications should get access to the phone and network services of the iPhone, but nothing specific was presented. I think this was another mediocre part of the presentation. Maybe good enough for some, but certainly not what most developers had in mind when they asked for development tools. It remains to be seen if Apple is right on this one.

What else is there to say? A large crowd was gathered as usual, more than 5000 persons we was told. And apple did the usual but very annoying marketing trick of lining people out before we could get in - had to stand in line for quite a long time. Now, I'm usually not the line-standing kind of guy, but I am still somewhat on the Norwegian timezone as I flew over only yesterday, and couldn't get much sleep after 5:30 in the morning anyway. So I get out of bed, had a shower, went to a breakfast place which was quite nice - Cafe Venue, I'll post the address later on if someone care. And then I went down to Moscone convention center. There I found a long, long, long queue of people waiting to get in. Which is only marketing of course. It was 7:30 in the morning, and a couple hundred people waited to get in as this was a rock concert or something. There where rumours around that someone was getting into the line 3 in the morning. That is simply a freakshow.

So, Apple, I have this suggestion for you for next year. If you don't have anything more to give us than we got this year. Please, just open the doors and let people walk in and get a seat, just as we usually do. No need to be so annoyingly special all the time.

Ok, that's it for now - I'm off to more presentations. While the keynote wasn't that good, I hope the other presentations will be. At least, the rest of the week will have more technical content delivered by engineers. I'm looking forward to that.

Take care!

More on FoneLink and phones

A couple of days ago, I raved about the FoneLink program from novamedia, a very slick program for transferring information between my nokia E61i and a OSX machine. After a few more days of use, I realize that iSync still has its niche - the everyday simple syncing is probably better than with iSync. Bur for transferring documents, sounds, pictures, and in general organizing the content on the phone, FoneLink is better.

After blogging about FoneLink here, I got in touch with novamedia. I obtained a bit more information from them about a few issues that I and maybe someone else wonders about.

First, the note or description on events and todos. The reason this does not appear on the E61i and similar phones is that it is not supported by the default calendar app from Nokia. We can beg Nokia to fix this, or we can maybe use something else like papyrus (which I still have not got around to evaluate). At least, FoneLink can not solve this problem.

Further, I had to more questions for the FoneLink guys. As most of you know, the smartphones from SonyEricsson has really terrible support on OSX. So my follow-up to novamedia was whether support for the smartphones (like M600i , P1 and so on) from SonyEricsson was planned. On this question I was told that it is in the works, and probably available in about 3 months time. That will be really great - maybe I can go back to my favorite smartphone :)

My other question was about combining usb and bluetooth for syncing a device with FoneLink. Usually, you just want to connect with bluetooth for the everyday syncing, but from time to time you have larger amount of data you need to transfer. Today, a device in FoneLink is a combination of the device and the connection, so my E61i over bluetooth and the same E61i over usb is two different things. This mean that I can not choose the connection to use dependent on the amount of data I need to transfer. Now, there are ways around this but it will be rather neat if it get supported out of the box. I was told that novamedia is working on this, although I did not get an estimate on when we can expect this to be available.

So much about FoneLink and the great guys at Nova Media doing this fine application.

I have another problem with my E61i - predictive text. With all the smartphones I have had the last years, I have been able to start typing a word and the application I use, whether it is email, sms, or some other text, will suggest matching words from the dictionary. This is something I just expect to be in place, so I didn't gave it a thought at all when buying the E61i. After fiddling with settings and buttons quite a few hours, and reading manuals as well, I went to google. Just to find out that there are no predictive text support on this phone. Some claim in formus and the like that you don't need this on a phone with qwerty keyboard. But they are plain wrong. The M600i from Sony Ericsson for instance, have this - and a full keyboard, and I wrote messages much faster and more comfortable on that one than I do on the E61i.

So if someone hear me - please!

And while I wait for the perfect device, I note that every small device has it strengths and weaknesses. Maybe the manufacturers do this to have people like me hunt for the perfect all the time. I have been on the search for 10 years now, and I am still searching.

For a few days my plan was to replace the Fujitsu Siemens P1510d I am writing this on with the Oqo O2. But now I read online that there seems to be some quality problems with the oqo, which gives me some doubts. The most recent device seems to be the Everun from Raon. In addition there is the new Q1 ultra umpc from Samsung which seems to be interesting, as well as the Fujitsu U8240. I doubt any of these are the perfect device, but maybe close enough that I am willing to give them a try... The big question is of course how well they can run Linux, as I am allergic to bad operating systems.

Take care, folks!

New version of qtpfsgui!

Hi folks, it's been a while. I haven't had to much intersting to blog about lately. I have been busy doing other things instead, like cutting down trees in my garden, compiling software, chopping trees, fixing brakes on my car, more garden stuff, on so on... Anyway:

The 1.8.8 version of qtpfsgui for Mac is out, and I have compiled a version for Mac tonight. You get it in the regular place, our at sourceforge. New with this version on OSX is that the Documentation from the Help menu in the program should work, even if you put the application bundle somewhere else than in /Applications. Giuseppe is also working on internationalization, and I have tried to get this to work on OSX as well. How sucessfully that attempt is remains to be seen. I work on Norwegian translation, by the way, but that is far from finialized.

The last few releases, I have created a package which includes the necessary Qt libs. I have not got any feedback on this, and I really do not know if it is of any use to anybody. I can continue preparing that kind of image, but I don't see the point spending that extra time if no one use it. So, the release I have created this time requires that you already have Qt installed, or that you head our to Trolltech, and grab the Qt libs there. If you want me to continue creating the image with qtpfsgui and Qt bundled, please tell me to do so!

Please, go to sourceforge and grab the new qtpfsgui!

Take care!

Nice to know - MacOSX

The print subsytem on MacOSX is simply CUPS!

For a long time I have had one simply, but nagging issue with my Mac computers - printing from the command line. But it hasn't bothered my enough to actually solve the problem. Today, however, one of our Mac converts (or at least wannabies) entered my office with the intention of insulting the Mac. He started like "I want to run acroread from the command line," remember, his background is Linux. No problem I said, you just use open -a AdobeReader.app. No, no, he goes, I just want to process some PDFs into postscript. Why do you want to do that - the Mac handle pdf quite well? And the reason was that, because we didn't knew how to print from the command line, he send jobs to printers through a Linux server. And the Linux server needs postscript.

Aha, great opportunity to solve the cli printing issue. Now, I know of course that lpr is available. Problem is, though, that if I use that from the commandline, I don't know what the names of the printers are supposed to be - the argument to the -P option. And by default, the printing system thinks everything should go to the printer in Letter format, which does not work very well with our European printers. They want A4. And I know how to change paper size to A4 in the GUI, but this will not be the default anyway. At least not when you print with lpr from the command line, should you be lucky enough to hit the right printer.

I have heard some whispering about the print subsystem just beeing cups in the past. So I just gave it a shoot, typing in http://localhost:631 in my browser. And I just goes wow, wow, wow. Because what I see is just the regular, no-frills, cups admin system. With all the printers listed. And selecting "configure printer", I have the option of changing default paper size. I can even see the names of the printer queues. So, selecting one I like to use, changing the paper size, and then try out lpr -Pprinter file.pdf, and run off to the printer. And what do I see? The file.pdf appears as it should, on A4 paper and everything is just fine.

After clicking around in the cups admin system for a few more minutes, I had the printer I like to use most set as default and the paper size set to A4 for the most important once. I also figured out that I can do a grep on the file /etc/cups/printers.conf to get the list of available printers. Looking at the names, it is quite easy to figure out the mapping from printer to queue name. The grep commando I use is this one:

sudo grep "<Printer" /etc/cups/printers.conf | awk "{print \$2}" | sed "s/>$//"

Hope this of some interest to someone out there in the void!

Take care,

Qtpfsgui 1.8.7

I have uploaded a couple of new dmg's of qtpfsgui, v. 1.8.7, to sourceforge now. The one named qtpfsgui.1.8.7.dmg contains only the program itself with core libraries. For this to work, you need to install Qt4 from trolltech. The other version, qtpfsgui.1.8.7.qt.dmg, has Qt4 bundled in, but unfortunately I am not sure how well it works. Feedback is welcome!

Take care, and have fun!

Qtpfsgui 1.8.5 with Qt bundled

Seems like there might be a problem with the qtpfsgui image that have Qt libs bundled in. When using the version without Qt bundled, and a full Qt installed, everything works fine. Using the other version (on another Mac without Qt installed globally) everything works fine until I try to save the tonemapped image. Which does not work.

So, for now, go to trolltech and get the full Qt (Get it here!), and use the qtpfsgui 1.8.5 without Qt.

I report back when I have fixed the problem!

If you need hypre on your Mac!

[This piece was originally written for the hypre support mailing list. I guess this can be of some use to people in the same situations, so I also post it here. If you don't understand what this is all about, you can visit the hypre webpage at LLNL, or you can just move on...]


Hi hypre-list,

As far as I can tell, MacOSX (Darwin) is not supported by hypre. We are however building a piece of sotware at Simula Research Lab, Norway, where we have added hypre as one of the dependenices (mainly for BoomerAMG), and since we need to support MacOSX, I went through the necessary steps for building hypre on MacOSX. I share it on this list as plain text now. If you in the future want to support Mac, and want help with testing or anything (patches?), just contact me!

I have to admit, some of my changes are a bit hack'y, my motivation was to get things going; I'll see if I can clean up things later. For reference, I am working with hypre-2.0.0 as downloaded from http://www.llnl.gov/casc/hypre/software.html in mid-april 2007.

This is how I run configure:
LDFLAGS="-framework vecLib -flat_namespace" CXX=g++-4 F77=gfortran ./configure --without-MPI --enable-shared --prefix=$HOME/software/hypre --without-fei --without-superlu --without-mli --with-blas --with-lapack


* First, I needed to add a "Darwin" section in the script src/configure, around line 9885:
---8<---
Darwin*) FFLAGS="${FFLAGS} -fno-common -fPIC"
CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -fno-common -fPIC"
CXXFLAGS="${CXXFLAGS} -fno-common -fPIC"
BUILD_F77_SHARED="${F77} -flat_namespace -dynamiclib -undefined dynamic_lookup"
BUILD_CC_SHARED="${CC} -flat_namespace -dynamiclib -undefined dynamic_lookup"
BUILD_CXX_SHARED="${CXX} -flat_namespace -dynamiclib -undefined dynamic_lookup"
;;
---8<---

* Next problem was with multiple definitions of symbol 'final_innerprod_result', which appear as a global symbol in both src/struct_mv/struct_innerprod.c and src/struct_mv/struct_overlap_innerprod.c. To fix this, I changed the symbol to 'final_overlapinnerprod_result' in src/struct_mv/struct_overlap_innerprod.c.

* The common way to use blas and lapack on MacOSX is with the '-framework vecLib' LDFLAG. Because of this, the variables 'LAPACKLIBDIRS' and 'BLASLIBDIRS' in config/Makefile.config contains 'null' after finished configure. This is probably something that should be fixed in config/Makefile.config.in or in the configure script, but for now I just removed 'null' such that those variables read:

LAPACKLIBDIRS =
BLASLIBDIRS =

* There are some paths that seems to be hardcoded that end up in LDFLAGS in Makefile.config; after configure I have '-L/usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-redhat-linux/3.2.3' in there. On Darwin, gcc exit with an error if non-existent directories are passed in with -L flag, so this path must be removed. Also, /usr/apps/libs and /lib are in there. I removed all three in the configure script.

* On Darwin, dynamic libs should have the suffix .dylib, not .so. Unfortunately, .so is hardcoded into the hypre buildsystem. I tried to do something such that the same buildsystem could do both .so and .dylib, based on platform, but it took more effort than the hour I was willing to spend :) Renaming the compiled .so into .dylib seems to be sufficient, at least to compile and run some of the tests. So, while this is something that have to be fixed if Darwin is to be supported, it is not a showstopper.

As far as I can tell from the notes I made during my work on this, you'll have a working hypre on MacOSX after working through these steps.

Hope this can be of some help!